Reality's for Losers: Give Me Wii

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Reality's for Losers: Give Me Wii

Every week, the world of technology bestows new inventions, improvements and innovations upon us, each one accompanied by a clarion flourish of hype. Amongst the novelties tumbling this month from the cornucopia are two new game systems – the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii – and a motion-detecting T-shirt that allows you to make real guitar sounds when you play air guitar.

But before we welcome, buy or endorse new inventions like these, it's useful to challenge the hype with some tough questions. Everyone's concerns will differ slightly, but I find that my big, recurrent ones all start with the letter E. Typically, before I agree that the world and I need this new thing, I'm going to want to know how it'll impact ethics, etiquette, environment and embodiment.

Ethics: Does the new product improve the world, society, people? Will it improve some lives at the cost of others? How will it alter the relations between human beings?

Etiquette: What new conventions or regulations will be needed to make sure people – or governments, or corporations – use this new "form of magic" responsibly? Will people adopt an accompanying etiquette of their own accord, or will they have to be "legislated into consideration"?

Environment: Is this new thing going to mess up or clean up the world we live in and depend on?

Embodiment: If all technologies are basically extensions of our bodies, how does this new thing affect us as embodied creatures? Does it give us new powers, extend us, throw out the existing balance between our senses, or cause some perfectly useful body parts to wither and atrophy?

It can be fun to throw a new technology into this grid of questions and see how it shapes up. The air guitar T-shirt, for instance. In a story entitled "Hi-Tech T-shirt Amplifies Air Guitar Into the Real Thing," The Guardian newspaper reports that "Richard Helmer and a team of researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia's national science agency, fashioned the "wearable instrument shirt" out of an ordinary T-shirt fitted with an array of sensors.... The researchers say it allows anyone to thrash out their impressions of Led Zeppelin without ever picking up a real guitar."

OK, let's look at the ethics of that. As a self-taught guitar player – and perhaps a bit of a puritan – I subscribe to the "no pain, no gain" school of thought. In order to play the guitar, you should learn the guitar. That requires practice, application, concentration. It isn't just a matter of striking poses.

How about etiquette? Well, are people going to be playing Led Zep riffs on the subway, making orgasm faces and doing the Pete Townshend helicopter arm thing at rush hour as they listen to the results on specially adapted iPods? Tell me it ain't so. Better yet, tell them it ain't so, preferably via a policeman.

As for environment, the prospect of every air guitar solo turning into an audible real world solo has me reaching for my earplugs. This will cause a ton of aural pollution. Think of the wildlife!

Where the shirt scores, though, is on embodiment. It basically turns a metaphorical, imitative gesture into a metaphorical, productive one. Rather than restricting us to watching others make real actions in the real world, it lets us use physical gestures to cause events in a virtual world – events as effective as the ones created in the real world. After all, an electronic sound is an electronic sound, however it's created, and an amp is an amp, whether it's attached to a guitar or a motion-detecting T-shirt.

This leads us directly to the two game systems released this month, the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii. Both feature motion-detecting wireless handsets, allowing users to prance around in front of their TVs, converting real-world air-guitar-type gestures into effective bowling, tennis or shepherding in the virtual world of the game.

I suppose ethics might pop up again at this point in the form of the question: "Is it right to lead people away from the real world – even if they were only spectators of it – into a virtual world where they're participating, but where nothing is real?" And I think the answer to that is that there's less and less difference between the real and virtual worlds these days. When we bank, vote, play, read and interact in virtual electronic space, it becomes, for all intents and purposes, real.

Indeed, it sometimes seems like it's the real world that has become virtual. The real world is the place where we waste time when we've got nothing better – nothing serious, in other words nothing electronic – to do.

The day the PS3 was launched in Japan, long queues formed at electronics stores where, thanks to problems manufacturing blue laser diodes, Sony had restricted supplies of the machine. According to Brad at the Tokyo Incidents blog, many of the people queuing were Chinese exchange students "getting 10,000 yen each to stand in line and buy a machine. They were giving them to stores who would then resell them at a huge markup to gamers elsewhere in the world.... There were also a lot of homeless people who were getting paid by Japanese people to do the same thing."

Well, fair enough, time is money. But if time really is money, why aren't we paying Chinese students and homeless people to play our video games for us too? Silly question: Only time spent out in the drab old real world is wasted time. In quality time, in electronic space, we have better things to do, things worth paying for. So keep herding those virtual horses and pixel goats, lovely Air Shepherdess! It worked for Marie Antoinette, didn't it? Well, up to a point.

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Momus, aka Nick Currie, is a Scots musician and writer who lives in Berlin. His blog is Click Opera.